A four-month trial based in Paris will be faced with 90 volumes of investigations, 534 pieces of evidence and several conflicting explanations of the crash, which happened in July 2000 as an Air France Concorde took off from Charles de Gaulle airport.

The plane, which took off with a plume of flames from its tail, flipped over and crashed into a motel a few minutes later, killing all 100 passengers and nine crew on board and four people on the ground.

At the heart of the hearing is whether the aircraft caught fire after a tyre burst when it hit a strip of titanium dropped from a previous American Continental Airlines plane.

The official conclusion of a 10-year investigation is that pieces of rubber from the burst left-hand undercarriage tyre were projected into a fuel tank, causing a massive leak of kerosene, which caught fire. The pilot, who was by then beyond the point of no return on takeoff, struggled to keep the plane in the air and headed for the nearby Le Bourget airport. But, just two miles from the end of the runway at Charles de Gaulle, the Concorde, carrying German holidaymakers on their way to New York for a Caribbean cruise, plunged into the motel.

But conflicting reports will suggest the Concorde was badly maintained and serviced, had inherent design weaknesses and was overloaded. Several witnesses claimed they had seen the plane on fire before it hit the titanium strip. These allegations throw part of the blame on to Air France, which is not subject to any legal proceedings, leading some to claim a cover-up. Air France admits some mistakes were made in repairing the plane's undercarriage, but say they could not have caused the tyre to burst.

Continental Airlines and five individuals will be on trial for involuntary manslaughter in a specially enlarged courtroom at Cergy-Pontoise in the west of Paris. The defendants are two of Continental's Paris ground staff, a retired senior French air safety official and two members of the Concorde programme. They all face up to five years in prison and a maximum fine of €75,000 (£66,000) if found guilty. Continental faces a maximum fine of €375,000.

Continental and its two employees are accused of allowing the 43cm piece of titanium, known as a wear strip, to drop off one of its DC-10 planes as it taxied down the runway ahead of the Concorde. The other defendants are Concorde's former head of testing and former chief engineer, both in their 70s, and the retired head of France's civil aviation authority, accused of having failed to detect and repair faults in the aircraft that investigators claim contributed to the crash.

Olivier Metzner, the lawyer for Continental Airlines, denies the US company was responsible for the crash. "There are numerous witnesses, professionals like fire officers, pilots, who state that Concorde caught fire 700 metres before contact with the [titanium] strip," he told France Soir newspaper.

Metzner said there had been 33 incidents of Concorde's tyres bursting between 1980 and 2000 and that recommendations to modify the plane had not been carried out.

After the crash Air France immediately halted all Concorde flights. The last British Airways Concorde flew its final commercial flight in October 2003.